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disciplinarian. “Parents expected the teacher to teach and the children to be disciplined. I had many of themtell me ‘If my boy misbehaves, spank him,’ and I spanked.”
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School Supplies
Supplies and enrichment programs at Rappahannock’s scattered country schools depended primarily on the ingenuity of the teachers and the support and cooperation of parents and patrons.
Miss Elsie Dodson and Forest Grove School near Viewtown are examples of how that old fashioned system worked best.
Forest Grove’s PTA raised money to buy a refrigerator and an electric stove for the little school. “Then the parents would come in and make hot soup at lunch time for us,” Miss Dodson recalled. “We didn’t have inside toilets until the PTA raised the money for plumbing and for the biggest hot water heater I’d ever seen. They decided it didn’t make any difference what color the walls in the classroom were but children needed books so they donated money for a library. Of course, the school board gave us some help but most of it came from the PTA. They even gave us a duplicating machine and a projector.”
“We didn’t have music or physical education until the schools consolidated but people volunteered to come in and help,” she continued. Charlotte Nicholson and Lucy May Hitt played the piano for Miss Dodson’s classes. Joan St. Clair helped with singing and dancing lessons. “Mrs. Cargill helpped me with my music and Billy Payne’s mother, Mary Miller, would leave the bank (when Miss Dodsontaught at the Washington school) and come up at lunch time to help with singing.”
“You know teachers are beggars. They can ask for anything,” Miss Dodson continued. “The worst thing that cold happen was that someone would say ‘no’.” Many g£,the requests were no longer necessary after consolidation and the advent of federally funded programs, an improvement Miss Dodson viewed with mixed reaction. “Begging was kind of fun. It was kind of challenging,” she explained.
At Battle Run, Anne Keyser didn’t have much in the way of school supplies to offer her children. There were 25 to 50 library books that the children were allowed to read, but not to take home. “I soon changed that,” Mrs. Keyser said. “I appointed one girl librarian and let the children take them home. Most of them were way ahead of their parents already and I wanted the parents to read them.”
At the older schools, no spellers were provided, but the students used dictionaries. Lee Cornell and Ruby Dwyer remember their parents telling them that they used the big dictionary to learn spelling words. Stant Weaver also remembers this about Round Hill School in 1905. “We just learned a page at a time,” he said. “So it didn't matter whether they were hard or easy. We just learned them in order.”
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